


too hard at all

by devereauxing



Series: waves of alternatives [2]
Category: Bohemian Rhapsody (Movie 2018), Queen (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, M/M, Mild Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-02-28
Packaged: 2019-11-06 23:05:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17948888
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devereauxing/pseuds/devereauxing
Summary: anon: when roger from ur fic gets sick is he a whiny needy sick who thinks he’s gonna die all the time and wants to be cuddled 24/7 or is he the type to act as if nothings wrong until he physically can’t anymore and like passes out or smthinganswer: he got a stitch running up some stairs once and he genuinely almost had brian convinced he had appendicitis (this was when they had just first met. brian is more worldly now. he knows he’s full of shit).





	too hard at all

Brian determinedly kept his eyes focused on the notepad he had laid out in front of him, squinting at the suspicious chicken scratch script which was just barely legible the closer it got to the edges of the paper. He wasn’t quite sure if the lyric was meant to now include ‘doner kebab’ or if that had just been Tim’s lunch request from the day before.

Tim had had Subway, though. Perhaps he’d changed his mind?

It didn’t really seem like it fit, but also Tim was a wanker with delusions of grandeur who probably did think he could fit throwaway lines about takeout food into someone else’s song. Brian had long since given up on Tim realising that he wasn’t some kind of lyrical genius, and nor was he writing the kind of music that could make his less-than-polished lyrics palatable to, well, anyone with ears.

Roger let out a groan.

Brian rubbed his thumb against his eyebrow for a moment before giving in and looking up. Roger was laid out on his sofa, clutching at his side as he had been for the past twenty minutes and pouting pathetically up at the ceiling.

“How goes the stitch,” Brian asked, decisively crossing out Tim’s potential lyric. Tim could throw a tantrum if he really wanted to, most likely would either way, but Brian was not about to stand in front of a room of punters and croon backing vocals about a fucking _doner kebab_.

“There’s no way this is a stitch,” Roger moaned, throwing an arm over his eyes haphazardly. “It hurts too much.”

“You ran up six flights of stairs,” Brian replied drily, tapping the pen to his mouth absently as he considered the sloppy bassline Tim had jotted down in the margin. He crossed that out too. “After drinking three pints. It’s a stitch.”

Roger huffed, his next intake of breath sounding just slightly too close to a sniffle for Brian’s liking. He watched him for a long moment, eyeing the hand still clutched at his side suspiciously.

There was no way.

“I’ve never had a stitch last this long before,” Roger said mournfully, letting the arm that had been covering his eyes fall to the side and wriggling his head to an awkward angle that let them make eye contact. “And I feel a bit sick.”

Pen still tapping against his bottom lip, Brian repeated: “You ran up six flights of stairs after drinking three pints.”

“Fine,” Roger said with a sigh, turning his head back to the ceiling. His hair was all mussed up around him, tangled up in knots, and for a moment Brian let himself think about what it would be like to be braced above him and looking down at his flushed cheeks and—

Huh. His cheeks did look a little flushed, now he thought about it. Maybe still heated from his impromptu sprint? That had been almost half an hour ago now, though.

No. It was just warm in the flat; late spring had finally lifted the fog of perpetual rain from the city and was allowing for the vestiges of winter to be lifted from its bones at last. Brian lived in an old block of flats, once owned by the council and then sold off to some international developer once they were all in too high a state of disrepair to risk the potential for legal action if a tenant died — and, of course, the risk of electoral defeat if said tenant happened to die at an inopportune time of year. The flats held on to the cold during winter like jealous lovers, bleeding heat as if the concept of insulation just simply hadn’t been around in the fifties when they’d been built. He spent most of the colder months bitterly cursing the cold and counting the days until the frost thawed. Then, of course, the warmer months would hit and he’d be in exactly the opposite situation: laying in little more than his boxers on the tiles in the kitchen, rolling cool cans of Coke over his forehead and calculating whether or not he could afford another cold shower.

Roger pushed up on the sofa and pouted some more, hissing a sharp breath as he moved. Brian tried to turn his attention back to the absolute slaughterhouse that Tim had turned his, admittedly not yet perfect, song into. For some reason he’d added a completely unnecessary, both generally and grammatically, apostrophe to a word. Brian crossed it out once, twice, and then a third time for good measure.

He paused, squinted down as the inky black mess he’d made of the once-apostrophe and then made to raise the pen again.

“Brian,” whined Roger, plucking the pen from his hand and chucking it over his shoulder. He grabbed Brian’s hand and, ducking down, put it to his forehead. “Am I hot?”

 _Yes_ , thought Brian. Then reality came filtering in.

“No,” he said, snatching his hand back.

“Brian,” Roger whined again, blinking down at him with too-wide eyes that— _fuck_ , were they watering? “Brian, you didn’t even feel. I just want to know if I need to go to the doctors.”

“Why would you need to go to the doctors?” Brian asked, nonplussed. “You have a stitch, Rog.”

Roger sighed heavily, whirling around to collapse once more on the sofa where, upon making contact, he let out a pitifully small: “Ouch.”

Brian watched his dramatics evenly, a small smile playing about his lips. Turning back to the notepad in front of him he rolled his eyes as he realised his pen was now somewhere in the vicinity of the telly where Roger had chucked it. Pushing himself out of his chair by the makeshift desk he went to make his way over towards the television, failing to take into account one crucial detail.

“Bri,” Roger said softly, whipping out a hand to clutch at his wrist as he went to walk by. Brian teetered for a second on his heels as he scrambled to reassert some control over his trajectory, stumbling for a moment. “Please? I feel really rotten. I had a stomach ache yesterday in’all.”

Big blue eyes blinking up at him and blonde locks spread out on soft cushions; how could Brian say no?

“It’s a stitch, Rog,” Brian insisted, even as he placed the back of his hand against Roger’s forehead as bidden.

“Never had one last half an hour before,” Roger mumbled, eyes fluttering at the contact.

Brian frowned: he did look a little flushed, and in all honesty he felt warm too. His left arm was still holding onto his flank, knuckles whitened by the harsh grip.

“Bet it’s my appendix,” Roger continued, with a roll of his eyes. Brian batted at the hand he’d had clutched to his side and prodded around at the area he assumed the appendix was most likely in. It felt a little rigid. “The fact we even still have appendixes is fucking ridiculous, you know? Explain that one to me then, Darwin.”

And right then — just as panic was starting to rise in Brian’s chest and, for some fucking reason, the Bee Gee’s _Staying Alive_ began ringing in his head — Roger’s phone rang. Panic stuck half way up his esophagus and fingers twitching in anticipation of starting compressions to the beat of the Bee Gee’s, an annoying hang up from his junior First Aid training he’d still yet to shake, Brian watched as Roger answered.

“Heya babe,” Roger said, shooing Brian from his side with a shake of his fingers and a soft smile. “You’re out front? ... Yeah, I’ll be right down.”

… What?

“Wait, what?” said Brian, trailing after Roger as he leapt from the sofa, scurrying down the hallway to toe on his trainers next to the front door.

“Thanks for looking after me, Bri,” Roger said hurriedly, giving him a quick hug which he barely had time to return before he was out of his arms again and shrugging on his jacket. “Gotta run, Freds and I have got plans. I’ll see you at practice tomorrow, yeah?”

“Yeah,” mumbled Brian, his mind still trying to catch up to what the hell was happening. He watched Roger’s retreating back confusedly, his arm coming up to wave an absent minded goodbye as he ducked into the stairwell and began bounding back down the steps.

Standing in his doorway, the Bee Gee’s continued their repetitive setlist in his head.

**Author's Note:**

> soooo!!! some of y'all are lovely and send me asks over ye olde tumblr about atmrfl(ac) which i appreciate so so so hard! but also i know some of you probs aren't over there so i thought i should probably crosspost xx
> 
> i'm candidroger over there if you want to say hi!! im super nice so long as you don't mind too many selfies and my insane thirsting in tags.....


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